Deeplinks Blog posts about Security

The World Wide Web Consortium has taken the extraordinary, controversial step of standardizing DRM in the form of something called Encrypted Media Extensions, which will be part of HTML5. Because of laws like the DMCA and its international equivalents, security researchers who reveal flaws in HTML5-compliant browsers will face punishing legal jeopardy. We're worried that this means that critical bugs in the browsers billions of people rely upon will take longer to come to light and are more likely to be exploited in the wild.

Last summer, some of the world's most prominent security researchers told the US Copyright Office that the DMCA kept them from coming hforward with flaws they've discovered.

While a federal court in San Bernardino may never rule on the flood of arguments supporting Apple's defense of user security, observers—especially members of Congress—should pay close attention to a few themes that have emerged in the public debate.

EFF, ACLU, and Access Now released a statement in support of Apple and its stance on encryption last week. We called on the President to reject any attempt to force backdoors like the one the FBI was seeking to Apple’s operating system. We asked our communities to help by tweeting at the President.

Over three thousand people have joined us, sending a stream of tweets to the President.

In a recent Deeplinks post and in some of our other communications about the Apple case, we've referred to what the government wants Apple to do as creating a "backdoor." Some people have questioned the use of the term, but we think it's appropriate. Here's why.